That rules android right out, as it still is more of a tech-demo than an OS

Huh? Android is the OS of 56% of all smartphones in use by consumers in the world. How is that a "tech-demo?" It still has a few bugs but otherwise it is a remarkably stable and competitive Linux-based OS.

Absolutely not. There are things beyond business and money and whether Steve Jobs is sick or not is not my business as an investor in Apple. I knew the unknowns when I signed up to be an investor.

Everything can be looked upon as relevant to my investment, but some things ought to be off limits. Illness is sacrosanct. Family is sacrosanct. Whether Jobs wanted to disclose either of those things to me was his decision, and one that I trusted him to make when I voted for the board that kept him as CEO.

National Geographic, the band Ayreon, the band Rennaissance, MIT and, despite being dead, Michael Crichton have joined the suit.

*proved that the AI had mastered these things, not the test

Except I don't think the Turing Test will ever actually prove anything but that a human being was "fooled." That can never be a meaningful statement because it's just as much a fact about the interviewer as it is about the subject that fooled him(in this case, AI).
Even if fooling an interviewer somehow proved that the Turing Test had mastered human conversation and language, there are many other domains of human cognition that it simply ignores.

If there was some sort of objective blush test, a la Blade Runner, where a machine was scored on his ability to work through not just human interaction but also moral problems, social problems, perceptual problems, emotional problems, memory problems, language problems - the whole range of human cognition, in other words - then we might have something that could determine whether software was a "complete AI." But the Turing Test is an inexact swipe in that direction.

It's a physics joke. It's...just...oh, nevermind.

I disagree. The overwhelming trend in computer networking ever since the 60s has been towards higher and higher global connectivity. Slowly at first, and then an explosion. The infrastructure of the Internet was being developed with or without HTTP. If HTTP became proprietary another more open protocol, if not Gopher, would have taken its place eventually. Maybe we would have been sandboxed inside of online services for a little bit longer, but it would eventually have occurred to somebody to use Ted Nelson's idea of hypertext - which was already floating out there - on the Internet.

People are information machines. Connecting them together electronically was only a matter of time.

It's still not clear what the economic incentive to travel in space is, exactly, or how to realize those incentives in an economically profitable manner. However the economic benefits of direct and persistent inter-connectivity have been obvious for a long time.

There is no meaningful comparison to be made here to either mothers nursing or Jim Crow, and to do so is, at least in the latter case, offensive. Jim Crow was a unconstitutional system of laws that discriminated against people based on race. Race, the last I checked, is not a choice, nor is it relevant to whether or not you are able to use the bathroom or patronize a restaurant. Using a fake or real name on a social network is a choice. It is also relevant to the quality of a social network in which every identity is only as trustworthy as the number of people that can vouch for it.

Here's how you tell Facebook to making you use your real name : stop using it. Nobody is forcing you to do so. Within the bounds of who uses their service, Facebook is perfectly within their rights to ask that you use your real name. It's their system, their software, their servers that it is running on, their network. If that's not something you can accept, just go to "Deactivate" in the preferences.

Oh, wow. You did not just compare having to use your real name on Facebook to Jim Crow segregation. Oh, wait. You did.

What? As far as I know, the people who resent the new version of FCP (that's what you're referring to when you say iMovie, right?) are just doing something very simple: not upgrading. Much like with Windows XP/Vista/7, as soon as the re-write of FCP matures to the same or better level of functionality you will see upgrades. No market gone. An entire generation of film and TV producers have been trained on FCP and will continue to use it.

That must be why 60 Republican House members held U.S. credit-worthiness and the economy hostage on behalf of the Tea Party. You are right that there seems to be a split in the Republican Party between the establishment and the Tea Partiers. In party identification, they both belong to the Republican Party. Similarly, there's also a split in the Democratic Party between progressive and DLC liberals. But, for the most part, both wings go under the name "Democrats."

Either way it is a penalty and an attempt to regulate freedom of association outside of school. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a rational interest for the government to prevent "friend-ing" online - someone would have to prove that it really does bring down incidences of inappropriate contact/sexual molestation/etc. And if we can't trust our teachers not to molest our children, using Facebook or any other conduit, then aren't there deeper problems here?

I wouldn't say that. What the Tea Party is: a successful re-branding of the Republican Party. There is no "Tea Party." It's the Republican Party.We've allowed the Republican party to effectively change its name after being poisoned by the Bush years, without asking any questions of any kind about its democratic legitimacy (such as whether or not it is actually grassroots and not a magnificent example of astroturfing). It allows Fox News to continue to create the illusion that the Republican Party is a sufficient vehicle to channel the democratic impulses of the right-wing working class, and to keep people with actual libertarian or conservative impulses inside the Republican tent. In fact, the Republican Party is just as corporate as ever, and has no intent on working to shore up its relationship with the working-class in actual policy measures.

Here was the problem, according to the article.

Like Apple's service(which is licensed), Mp3.com's unlicensed service did not ask users to upload all the tracks. If it already had a track with the same fingerprint somewhere on its servers, it would just copy and save the user the time/bandwidth of the upload.

That was the legal snafu that got them in trouble, for some reason. Even though it's functionally identical to having the user upload every single track, the court wants the service to keep a unique, individual copy of every track the user owns. It's kind of absurd, because this means the service will have to store millions of copies of the same song.

Google does this already. They store millions of extra tracks. That's why they feel like they can win the legal case.

Oh, no. I'm talking about the labels. The labels are the idiots here. Google and Amazon clearly have rationally weighed the cost-benefit analysis of moving forward without licensing, and decided it's worth it, since their model is akin to the Cablevision model (re: the article) which won its own case about storing content. And they're probably right.